...Global politics seen through life in this strange tiny village in West Wales...

On arrival at work this morning there was a note on my desk summoning me to the office of my esteemed leader, the boss of the village parish council and greedy lunatic, Mrs. Dorothy ‘Binky’ Trim. I grabbed my pad and stubby pencil so I could take notes and ran along the corridor to Mrs. Trim’s office.To my surprise the office door was firmly shut and the light inside was off. There was a note pinned to the outside of the office door. I slowly read what it said (I’m a slow reader). I reproduce it for you below:‘Not this office, you twerp, my new one above my sweet shop and bring your pad and pencil.’

It was signed, ‘Binky.’

I was befuddled.

Whilst I was standing there looking flummoxed, ‘Ginger’ the young lad from the post-room passed by in the corridor whistling highlights from ‘the funeral march.’ He glanced at the note.“You off to see Mrs. T. then?” he asked.

Obviously he knew something I didn’t, so I came right out with it and asked him if he knew what was going on.

“She’s relocated,” he said, “You obviously haven’t been up to the news feed ticker tape room this morning, Granddad.”

I cheerfully poked the cheeky young gobshite in the eye with my stubby pencil, and then headed for the ticker tape room. Once there I frantically searched through the waste bin for any snippet that might have some relevance to my esteemed leader’s sudden relocation form her official office in the parish council building to the grubby room above her shop. You may recall she tried to rent it out to Donald Trump a couple of times, firstly for Trump’s carousal with Chinaman Kim Jong Un and latterly for Trump’s one-on-one with ‘Vlad the Bad’ Putin. In both cases she failed to entice any of these great world leaders to use her crappy ‘facilities,’ but did manage to retain several $25 deposits paid in error by Trump’s dozy administration.The room is awful. It has one tiny grimy window that faces the bus shelter across the road, and there’s no electricity. It’s lit by ancient gas lamps fed from a pipe that goes out of the window and dangles down into the enormous sink hole in the high street outside her shop.

The sink hole is where the council now dumps all its garbage in a pointless attempt to fill the bloody thing in. However, it is virtually bottomless. The villagers’ garbage is mostly vegetable matter generated from their allotments, so as a consequence, there is much fermentation going on somewhere down inside the hole. This generates an abundance of marsh gas. Mrs. T. claims to be ‘doing her bit’ for the environment by syphoning it off to power her gas lamps.Back to my story.

At last I came across a string of ticker tape that could possibly be at the root of Mrs. Trim’s bizarre relocation. It was an article about her hero, the cheese-ball headed self-declared Braniac and fanny magnet Donald Trump. I summarize for you below the nib of its gist:The impoverished and put upon American taxpayer has once again been burnt by the cash-weasel Trump and his band of butt-lizards for Trump’s further personal enrichment. On his recent trip to the UK Trump stayed for two days at one of his own properties, Turnberry, for ‘golf politics’ but charged the taxpayer a massive $wedge for his stay!

The US taxpayer picked up the tab for the great man himself plus his ‘lingerie model potential’ robot faced wife, Melanie, his brat, Eric, ‘funbag’ Sarah ‘Huckleberry Hound’ Sanders, some unknown idiot called John Kelly, plus other entourage butt-lizards.

The tab, clocking up $237,500 in total (for only two fecking days!), included payments of $30,074 and $37,744 to cover Trump’s accommodation costs (presumably for hosing out the crapper after he’d been), paid directly to the hotel operating company that Trump himself owns.

In addition there was a further $122,589 spent on providing rooms for the White House press corps, listed as being with “miscellaneous” other hotels, and just over $47,000 on secure telecommunications at the hotel.

It went on to say that such payments are not uncommon from the taxpayer to ‘cash-weasel’ Trump, the article citing ‘weekend breaks’ and ‘official visits’ using the money-magnet’s own properties, specifically his private Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and his golf club in Sterling, Virginia.

My heart sank.

Knowing Mrs. Trim as I do, I could see where this was heading. She is an enormous fan of ‘Ego the Terrible’ and will cheerfully jump on any bandwagon of his she thinks can be exploited to her own advantage.

I jotted down a few notes in preparation for my meeting with Mrs. T. as I left the office building and headed for her shop in the high street.

As I entered Mrs. Trim’s sweet shop (Nanny Trim’s Sweets ‘N’ Stuff) I nodded politely to Mrs. Trim’s blubby-hubby Leonard as I couldn’t bring myself to call him by his new title Lord Justice Arbuthnot Trim.

Through a mouthful of Turkish Delight, he spattered out, “She’s in her new office. Go straight up.”

I did.

I knocked and entered.

The contents of her office in the council building had been relocated to the room above her shop and set up exactly as they had been before, including the ewes milking stool in front of her desk.

I walked over and sat down on it.

Mrs. T. was occupied pulling the hairs from her nose with a pair of tweezers.

“Ah, about time,” she said when she at last noticed me, “We have a lot to do. Got your pad and pencil with you?”

I replied in the affirmative.

“Shall I start?” I asked, stealing her thunder.

She looked at me quizzically.

“Go on then,” she said.

“I’ve looked at the village hospital budget residuals and I think we can run to a fee paid to you directly of £2 per day for the rental for the office space. Then there’s the desk, your chair, your 3D picture of Donald Trump’s head, your ‘whoopee’ cushion for when you do staff appraisals, tea and coffee facilities provision et cetera… Let’s say an additional £1 a day. Then there’s gas, and wear & tear on the floor boards, the use of light through the window, background birdsong & street ambient noises fee…”

The list went on and on, dear reader. The final outcome was that the village hospital budget was to be plundered to the tune of £55 per day for the privilege of Mrs. T. working from home.“Let’s call it £50 a day and I’ll relocate back to the council offices to save the village money,” she said magnanimously, but added, “My consultancy fee for thinking that up will be £15 a day.”I didn’t so much nod agreement as bow my head in supplication.

“Bugger off and set up a direct debit,” she barked, then went back to tackle a particularly long grey hair dangling from her right nostril to below her bottom lip.

Just as in America, Llanaber lacks anybody with the balls to stop this blatant corruption and self-enrichment by those in power.

The £figures may be smaller here than in the US but the principle is very much the same. Good citizens, hard-working and patriotic, are helplessly standing by while their dubiously elected leader plunders the people’s money, money better spent on hospitals, and infra-structure, not spent on lining the pockets of the already super-rich.

Still, the soccer season starts soon, so that’ll help take our minds off getting back-shafted to buggery by those power-mad greedy gobshites.